January 6. I think I am through with the cave under the point--the Cavern of the Two Arches, I have named it. It is a dangerous place to work in alone, and my little skiff has been badly battered several times. But I peered into every crevice in the walls, and sounded the sands with a drill. I suppose I would have made a more thorough job of it if I had not been convinced from the first that the chest was not there. It was not reason that told me so--I know I may well be attributing too much subtlety of mind to Captain Sampson--but that strange guiding instinct--to put it in its lowest terms--which I know in my heart I must follow if I would succeed. Shall I ever forget the feeling that stirred me when first I turned the pages of my grandfather's diary and saw there, in his faded writing, the story of the mate of the _Bonny Lass_, who died in Havana in my grandfather's arms? My grandfather had gone as supercargo in his own ship, and while he did a good stroke of business in Havana--trust his shrewd Yankee instincts for that--he managed to combine the service of God with that of Mammon. Many a poor drunken sailor, taking his fling ashore in the bright, treacherous, plague-ridden city, found in him a friend, as did the mate of the _Bonny Lass_ in his dying hour. Oh, if my good grandfather had but made sure from the man's own lips exactly where the treasure lay! It is enough to make one fancy that the unknown Bill, who paid for too much knowledge with his life, has his own fashion of guarding the hoard. But I ramble. I was going to say, that from the moment when I learned from my grandfather's diary of the existence of the treasure, I have been driven by an impulse more overmastering than anything I have ever experienced in my life. It was, I believe, what old-fashioned pious folk would call a _leading_. The impetus seemed somehow to come from outside my own organism. All my life I had been irresolute, the sport of circumstances, trifling with this and that, unable to set my face steadfastly toward any goal. Yet never, since I have trodden this path, have I looked to right or left. I have defied both human opinion and the obstacles which an unfriendly fate has thrown in my way. All alone, I, a sailor hitherto of pleasure-craft among the bays and islands of the New England coast, put forth in my little sloop for a voyage of three hundred miles on the loneliest wastes of the Pacific. All alone, did I say? No, there was Benjy the faithful. His head is at my knee as I write. He knows, I think, that his master's mood is sad to-night. Oh, Helen, if you ever see these lines, will you realize how I have longed for you--how it sometimes seems that my soul must tear itself loose from my body and speed to you across half a world?